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Lunchtime talk write-up Posted on Tue 3 Apr 2018

Introducing our New Talent Residents: Somestic Media

Five Things I Learned:1. Vytautas Jankauskas and Jon Flint have worked together on various collaborative projects over last two years, but Somestic Media will be the first project that they will be working on together exclusi...

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Vytas is an artist and designer, interested in physical, social and digital identities. Both, individual and communal. His explored themes encompass borders, national pride and identity, digital relationships and beyond.

Jon is a designer with a hands on approach to making. Objects he designed and made have ended up in galleries such as the V&A museum, and Vitra design museum, to the back of pushchairs and bikes on the streets of London.

Lawrence is a poet. His work is influenced by various experiences of growing up in and around Easton and St Paul’s, Bristol where he is exposed to a medley of culture, identity and heritage. The impact of social...

I believe passionately in the role of art as an engine for change & understanding and hope to achieve this through moving image and sound. I'm currently working with Lawrence Hoo on an immersive exhibition.

Nicola is an illustrator, electronic music producer & creative technologist. Her first commission was illustrating a children's book when she was 16. She's also interested in video games and their power to educate.

Five Things I Learned:

1. Vytautas Jankauskas and Jon Flint have worked together on various collaborative projects over last two years, but Somestic Media will be the first project that they will be working on together exclusively. Previously Vytautas created video project How to Build a Water Filter, depicting a dystopian world that has been exhibited at the V&A and Superflux Studio.

2. Jon’s background is in product design, his project Drone Aviary explores the impact of drone technology in city-space through a series of installations, films and publications displayed at the V&A in 2015. Jon designed two semi-autonomous drone concepts for the city; the surveillance drone and the traffic drone. The real question is, do people really want this? Jon likes to pair narratives to objects and artefacts in order to answer certain questions and help reflect on what futures and societies we really want to have. Stories and narratives are integral to the work Jon and Vytautus create.

3. During their residency they will be working on Somestic Media, a project that uses three different domestic objects paired with three different social media platform features, including the last seen feature on Facebook messenger, Tinder’s distance tracker and Instagram’s live stories. However, these objects will only offer a one-way interaction, leaving the user powerless to react back. The project aims to examine our perception of time, distance and disruption through each object and potentially even highlight how creepy these features are.

4. The first object, aptly called Last Seen, is a digital clock that counts the time since someone has been last seen on Facebook. Digital radio Soul Mate is for finding a soul mate through broadcasts, which tells you using Tinder’s distance tracker when a potential suitor is nearby; AM mode announces distances and reads out dating profiles and if there’s a match you can switch to FM mode. Breaking Views is a TV gets interrupted by Instagram live stories, which you can chose to watch it over and over again. Maybe due to importance or romantic reasons.

5. Before the end of their residency their goal is to create all three objects as low-res cardboard prototypes to be used as conversation and probing tools for further development. These conversations will then create frameworks for social discussions and workshops dealing with artefacts as means of self-observation in cyberspace and potentially more advanced workshops developing new tools for social media frameworks.